Short answer
You cannot check a page’s real PageRank. Google removed the public score in March 2016 and has published none since. Every tool calling itself a PageRank checker shows something else, usually a third-party score such as Domain Rating or Domain Authority. In June 2026 Google added guidance confirming that it does not use third-party SEO tools and that their scores have no access to its ranking data.
Thousands of people search for a PageRank checker every month. Plenty of websites are happy to give them a number.
None of those numbers come from Google. Some are reasonable estimates, some are ten years out of date, and some are invented. Knowing which is which matters, because people still buy links, set agency targets and disavow backlinks on the strength of them.
What happened to the public score
Google showed PageRank as a 0 to 10 score in its Toolbar from December 2000. It last updated that score in December 2013 and removed it on 7 March 2016. The system itself is still part of Google’s core ranking, but no public value for any page has existed since. The full timeline is in PageRank history.
What PageRank checkers actually show you
- A third-party authority score with a new label. Many checkers simply display a metric from an SEO tool company and call it PageRank.
- An open alternative built from public data. Free projects such as Open PageRank calculate their own scores from public web crawl data. They are honest about what they are, but they are still not Google’s figure.
- Frozen toolbar values. Some sites still serve scores saved before 2016. Those describe the web as it was more than ten years ago.
- Numbers with no stated source. If a tool cannot explain where its figure comes from, treat it as decoration.
The giveaway is the scale. A 0 to 10 score today is either very old or borrowed; a 0 to 100 score belongs to a commercial tool.
The third-party scores people use instead
| Metric | Company | Scale | Based on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain Rating | Ahrefs | 0 to 100 | Strength of a site’s backlink profile |
| URL Rating | Ahrefs | 0 to 100 | Link strength of a single page |
| Domain Authority | Moz | 1 to 100 | Predicted likelihood of ranking, from link data |
| Page Authority | Moz | 1 to 100 | The same idea for one page |
| Authority Score | Semrush | 0 to 100 | Backlinks, estimated organic traffic and spam signals |
| Trust Flow and Citation Flow | Majestic | 0 to 100 | Link quality and link volume |
Each is a genuine piece of engineering by a company with its own web crawler. Each also reflects only that company’s view of the web, which is far smaller than Google’s and built on different rules.
What Google says about these scores
In June 2026 Google added a page to its Search Central documentation called Guidance on third-party SEO tools and advice. It makes three points that settle the question:
- Google does not use or endorse third-party SEO tools.
- Those tools have no access to Google’s internal ranking data, so their scores cannot reflect how Google sees a site.
- Search Console is the place for key information about how your site performs in Google.
That does not make the scores useless. It makes them estimates of link strength, produced by people outside Google, which is exactly how they should be treated.
Why the tools agree with each other
A 2023 academic study compared Moz Domain Authority, Semrush Authority Score and Ahrefs Domain Rating across the same sites and found the scores correlated very strongly, above 0.9 in every pair.
That sounds reassuring, and for one purpose it is: the tools broadly agree on which sites have stronger link profiles. But agreement between three outside estimates says nothing about whether any of them matches Google. They all count links in similar ways, so they share the same blind spots, including links Google has quietly decided to ignore.
Where third-party scores are useful
- Comparing link profiles between your site and competitors, using the same tool for all of them.
- Spotting sudden link loss on your own site, such as a batch of links disappearing after a partner redesign.
- Finding prospects for genuine outreach, as a first filter rather than a final judgement.
- Tracking your own trend over months, as long as you stick to one tool.
Where they mislead
- Judging a single link by the linking site’s score. A relevant link from a modest site often helps more than an irrelevant one from a high-scoring site.
- Disavowing by score. Low-scoring links are usually harmless, and removing them can throw away value. See traffic dropped after a disavow file.
- Buying links on high-scoring sites. Scores are easy to inflate with link networks, which is why many sites selling links show impressive numbers.
- Setting score targets for an agency. It rewards whatever moves the number, not what moves your traffic.
Every one of these repeats the mistake the toolbar caused: optimising for a visible number instead of for what it is meant to represent. Bought links that are holding a site back are covered in link penalty recovery.
How to judge a link without a score
Five questions tell you more about a link than any number.
- Is the linking site genuinely about your subject? Relevance is what makes a link meaningful.
- Would a real reader click it? A link in the body of a useful article is worth more than one buried in a footer or a list of fifty.
- Does the site have real visitors? Pages nobody reads tend to pass little, whatever their score.
- Was the link given or bought? Editorial links are what Google is built to reward; paid ones are what its spam systems are built to ignore.
- Does the site link to everyone? A page linking out to dozens of unrelated businesses is a link farm, however impressive its score.
If a link passes all five, its score hardly matters. If it fails most of them, a high score should make you more suspicious, not less.
What to measure instead
- Search Console’s Links report, which shows the sites and pages Google itself has found linking to you.
- Organic clicks to the pages you are building links to, which show whether the links are doing anything.
- Rankings for the searches that matter to you, measured in Search Console rather than estimated.
- Referral visits from linking sites, because a link real people click is rarely a link Google ignores.
If a client or manager asks for your DA
Agencies hear this question constantly, and it deserves a straight answer. Explain that the score is an outside estimate Google does not use, then show what Google does report: clicks, impressions, rankings for priority searches and the links Search Console has found.
Keep the score in the report as context, never as the target. A target invites someone to move the number by whatever means work, and the cheapest means are usually the ones that end in a link problem. Reporting on traffic and leads keeps everyone aimed at the outcome that actually matters.
If your Domain Rating or Domain Authority just dropped
Check Search Console before you worry. Tool providers periodically recalculate scores across their whole index, and changes in their own crawling can move numbers overnight with no change in Google at all.
If your clicks and rankings are steady, the drop is the tool’s, not yours. If they fell too, the score is a symptom worth investigating, starting with which links disappeared. How PageRank itself responds to lost links is covered in what is PageRank, and does Google still use it.
Where link analysis sits among Google’s other systems is covered in Google’s ranking systems explained.
Making link decisions from a third-party score?
Disavowing, buying or judging links by a tool’s number causes more damage than most updates. Send your Search Console access and within 48 hours I will tell you what your links are actually doing.
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